Into The Night (2 page)

The lamp was on, and the radio. Both stayed on all night as she sat in her room, waiting for them to come for her. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before the police came to her room and knocked on her door. When that happened, she would admit them and tell them what had happened. How she had tried to kill herself. How she had been spared, and how a woman across the street had been chosen by some unseen hand to die in her place.

How, more prosaically, she had acted thoughtlessly with a gun, and how a bullet had found its way through an open window and into living flesh.

And then what would happen to her?

She didn't know. What she had done had not been murder in the technical sense of the word. It had, to be sure, been an accident. But this did not mean the law would not find her at fault. It had been a criminal accident, and there would certainly be some penalty she would have to pay for it. And that was fitting enough. She had deprived another woman of her life. Whatever penalty the law exacted would be no more than fair.

And so she waited for them to come. She had slipped away from the scene outside moments after the woman's life had slipped away. Gently she'd laid the woman's head on the pavement. The crowd had opened up for her as she stepped through it, closing again around the woman's body without taking note of Madeline. But someone surely had noticed her, and someone would say something to a policeman, and they would come to her door, if only to seek her testimony as a witness. Perhaps she had been there when the woman was shot. Perhaps she had seen the killer, or noted the license number. Certainly she ought to be questioned, so that they might determine what she did or did not know.

The radio played on. Outside, the police cars came and went, the crowd dispersed. The gun, still wrapped in its velvet bag, remained on the table where she had flung it. From where she sat, she could see the ugly hole marked with powder burns where the bullet had exited.

If she had known the police were not to come, perhaps she might have turned the gun again on herself. But she fully expected their visit and was willing to leave the matter of her retribution up to them. Even when the sky lightened with dawn, she waited for them to appear.

But they did not appear.

For two days she waited. She did not leave the room. She did not eat or drink. It was impossible to say if she slept. She stayed in her chair, and there were times when her eyes were open and times when they were shut.

After two days, she knew the police were not going to come.

Starr Bartlett.

She had a name now, the dead woman. A name that breathed life, romance, even glamour. Starr Bartlett.

Madeline had learned this from the radio, before she realized that the police were not coming. She learned more from the newspapers she bought after she finally left her room. Starr Bartlett had lived in a rooming house just two blocks from Madeline's own. She was young, in her twenties, and unmarried. She lived alone. And she had been struck down from a bullet which witnesses indicated had been fired from a passing automobile. No motive for the slaying had been uncovered, and police were convinced that the murder was the work of a random killer, possibly performed in imitation of a series of killings which had taken place two months previously in a large city a thousand miles away, and which had had enough press coverage to prompt a deranged person to emerge as a copycat killer.

If he struck again, a policeman was quoted as saying, they would surely get him.

The implication being that this particular case had reached a dead end, and that, if there were no more similar killings, the murderer would escape uncaught.

Well, there would be no more killings, not with that gun. Madeline placed it, velvet bag and all, inside a brown paper bag, and tucked the package into her purse. She took a long walk, and in its course she pushed the wrapped-up gun down a storm drain. It would most likely never be found; if it were, it would never be connected to her.

So she had gotten away with murder.

She thought about that a day or two later as she sat at a lunch counter sipping a cup of coffee. She had bought a paper and was searching through it for further coverage of the death of Starr Bartlett, but there was nothing. And unless she confessed, she thought, there would be nothing. Because the story had run its course. Starr was dead and her death had become part of the great body of unsolved crimes in the city's files. There would be no more stories because there was nothing more to be said.

She saw those eyes, staring up at her. And the light going out of them, as the life went out of their owner.

"You all right, miss?"

She looked up. The counterman's face was a mask of concern.

"The look on your face," he said. "Like you were gonna faint, or something."

"No," she assured him. "No, I'm all right."

Should she confess?

She thought about it. If the police had come, she would have confessed in a minute. But when they failed to appear it was as if she was being told that her confession was not required or even desired.

But what did that mean? Did she go scot-free?

That seemed inappropriate. Perhaps nothing would be gained by her confession, but what would be gained by her escaping punishment altogether? Wasn't she in debt? Didn't she owe something?

To whom? To the police? To the state? To Society with a capital -S?-

No.

To Starr.

The thought, once it came to her, seemed unmistakably obvious. She, Madeline, had tried to kill herself. She had been unable to do so. She had killed Starr instead.

Starr had died for her.

Therefore, she would live for Starr.

But how?

Starr, she thought, I wanted to die because my life had no purpose. Now I can find a purpose in living for you, and you can go on living through me. But for God's sake, who are you? What kind of life did you have, Starr? Starr, I don't know you at all!

"I suppose I should rent her room," the landlady said. "I guess I will, soon as I get around to it. I been sort of waiting for someone to come for her things, but I guess that's not going to happen. I haven't had the heart to pack up her things and send them. Long as her room's the way she left it, it's as if she could come back to it anytime. Soon as I pack up her stuff and rent the room out to somebody else, well, it makes her death that much more real for me, if you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," Madeline said.

"I suppose I'm being silly," the woman said. "If you want to see the room, I guess that's all right. I don't see who it would hurt. The police have been through it, looking for reasons why someone would kill her. Then I guess they decided no one had a reason to kill her, that she just got in the way of the bullet."

That was truer than anybody realized, Madeline thought.

"Right this way, then," the woman said.

A rooming house not unlike her own. The same cooking smells in the hallway, the kind of smells you got when cooking consisted mostly of heating up canned goods on hot plates. Creaking stairs. Walls that needed painting.

"You just can't keep up with an old building like this," the woman said defensively, although Madeline had said nothing. "One thing needs doing after another. You can't keep up with it, you know. Or else you'd have to raise the rents, and people can't pay but so much. I keep it clean, though, and I only rent to decent people."

They were at Starr's door. The woman knocked on it, then caught herself.

"I don't know why I'm knocking," she said. "Force of habit, I shouldn't wonder. I respect people's privacy, it's the way I was brought up."

She produced a key, turned it in the lock, opened the door. The room was smaller than Madeline's, but similarly furnished. The closet door was open, showing clothing on the hooks and hangers. The bed was made, and there was some clothing piled on it.

"You see what I mean," the landlady said. "It's like the room was waiting for her to come back to it."

"Yes," Madeline breathed.

"It's hard to take in what happened to her. Shot down that way."

"Yes."

"As young as she was."

"It's tough to die when you're young," Madeline said. "Like a stray dog."

"That's just it," the woman said. "She deserved better of life. She didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, and that's exactly how she did die. And for what purpose? For what purpose?"

Madeline didn't say anything. For a long moment the two women stood there. Then the older woman cleared her throat, as if she were about to say something, and Madeline said, "Tell me about her."

"What is there to tell? She lived here. Not for very long, but I felt that I knew her better than I did."

"How do you mean?"

"I don't know exactly. We didn't talk much. She mostly kept to herself. I told all this to the police." She looked at Madeline. "Why do you have to know all this?"

"Just a sense I have. That she and I were alike. Young women, single, living alone in rooming houses in this neighborhood. It could as easily have been me out there, out for a walk, struck down by a stray bullet."

"You feel a kinship with her," the woman said.

"I guess that's it. I feel that... that our lives are bound up in one another, even though we never met and I never knew her. I feel as though I owe her something."

"What could you possibly owe her?"

A life, she thought. Starr gave her life for me. She did it unwittingly, she didn't choose to do it, but what difference does that make? She died for me, and I have to live for her.

But of course she couldn't say that to the woman.

"Understanding," she said thoughtfully. "I owe her understanding."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Maybe I don't know what I mean either. But I feel as though our lives touched one another, and I want to get to know that woman whose life touched mine."

The woman said nothing for a long moment. Madeline moved through the room, went to the window, looked out. She turned, put a hand on the bed as if to test the springs.

The woman said, "There was no one in her life."

"You mean she lived alone?"

"I mean more than that. I mean she was alone with herself, completely alone. She wouldn't let other people get near her. I liked her, I felt good seeing her in the hallway or on the stairs, I'd always pass the time of day with her, but I never got anywhere near her. I don't think anybody did. I don't suppose anybody could."

"I see."

"I think she was sorrowful," the woman said. "She didn't broadcast her sorrow but I think it was there all the same. I think something or somebody caused her deep pain, and I don't think she ever got over that pain."

"Maybe she would have," Madeline said. "If she'd had a longer life."

"Maybe," the woman said. And then, after a moment, "But, you know, there are some kinds of pain you never get over."

"Yes," Madeline said. "I know."

"Well," the woman said. "If there's nothing else, I have things I ought to be doing. A house like this, there's always something that needs doing."

"Could I--"

"What?"

"I'd like to stay here."

The woman stared at her. "You want to rent her room? You want to live where she lived?"

It hadn't occurred to her, but now she allowed herself to entertain the thought. Could she move right into Starr's life that way?

The thought was not without a certain appeal, but it didn't really make sense. She didn't want to become Starr Bartlett, which was anyway impossible on the face of it. No, she wanted not to live -as- Starr but to live -for- her. To perform some service for Starr that the dead woman could not perform for herself.

But what service? What could that be, and how could she ever discover it?

"No," she said. "No, I don't want to rent the room. I think you should rent it to somebody, though. Clear it out and rent it. The way it is now, it's a tomb for an absent corpse."

"Yes," the woman said. "Yes, you're right."

"But in the meantime, I'd like to spend a little time here," she went on. "I'd just like to be alone here."

"Alone?"

"Well, virtually alone. Alone with Starr."

"You've had your sorrows too," the woman said pointedly. "Same as she did."

"Maybe."

"I guess it'd be all right for you to spend a little time here," the woman said. "I guess it wouldn't hurt anything. Except--"

"Except what?"

"I don't like to say it."

Madeline waited.

"Sometimes a person'll decide to... do away with theirselves. And rather than do it where they live, they'll take a room just for that purpose. That happened here once. A man came, no luggage, said it was being shipped, said he'd pay a week's rent in advance, and that very first night he took pills and died in his sleep." The woman avoided Madeline's eyes. "And you," she said, "wanting to see a dead woman's room, and wanting to be alone in it. I don't think you'd be wanting to do that, and I didn't want to say anything, but I was the one walked in on that man and discovered his body there. One look and I knew he wasn't sleeping. He didn't look anything like somebody who was sleeping. His face was so blue it was near to purple."

"How awful for you."

"They said he was sick with something that would have killed him before long. He wanted an easy death, and he came here to spare his loved ones the horror of finding him. But he evidently thought it was all right for a total stranger to have that same horror."

"I'm not going to kill myself," Madeline said gently.

"I know you're not. I shouldn't have said anything, but I... had to."

"I understand."

"You stay here as long as you like," the woman said. "I don't know what good it could do you, but it won't do anybody any harm, will it? Spend all the time you want. I left her room as she left it. I tidied up just a little. The police were through her things and they don't always take the time to be neat. There were some things they left on the floor that I straightened up and put on the bed there."

"I see."

"As if she wouldn't want her things left messy. As if she cares now what her room looks like. But she was neat, you know. She kept to herself and she kept her things neat. So it only seems right to keep them neat now."